The advent of cloud-based computing architectures has opened new possibilities for the rapid and scalable deployment of virtual Web stores, media outlets, and other online sites or services. In general, a cloud-based architecture deploys a set of hosted resources such as processors, operating systems, software and other components that can be combined or strung together to form virtual machines. A user or customer can request the instantiation of a virtual machine or set of machines from those resources from a central server or management system to perform intended tasks or applications. For example, a user may wish to set up and instantiate a virtual server from the cloud to create a storefront to market products or services on a temporary basis, for instance, to sell tickets to an upcoming sports or musical performance. The user can lease or subscribe to the set of resources needed to build and run the set of instantiated virtual machines on a comparatively short-term basis, such as hours or days, for their intended application.
When a set of virtual machines are instantiated, however, issues in the management of the configuration and identities of those transient machines can arise. For one, some cloud environments may offer compute and storage services separately and in such cases, create “stateless” compute nodes. After the set of virtual machines are built and instantiated, it may therefore be difficult or impossible to store an image of one of the virtual machines to create a template of the instantiated objects for future reference. If the user decides to update the configuration of the set of existing virtual machines, as a consequence there may be no way to access a template of the existing machines, and audit the hardware, software, and communications resources assigned to those machines. As a result, it may be difficult or impossible to perform an automatic update of all component resources to generate an updated set of virtual machines. The user therefore may have to configure updated virtual machines manually.
The configuration of any resulting updated set of virtual machines may likewise not be able to be automatically captured for management and identification purposes. It may be desirable to provide methods and systems for the management of cloud-based virtual machines that permits a user or network operator to track, store and manage the configurations of virtual machines, including in environments which lack permanent storage.